Roku announced Wednesday it has recently hired Ivan Pehar as its new ad sales director for Canada.
Pehar most recently served as the head of Canada ad sales at Spotify, a position he left earlier this summer. As country manager at Spotify Canada, Pehar “played a pivotal role in developing its go-to-market strategy for Canadian brands,” reads an emailed Roku announcement about his hiring at the streamer.
Prior to joining Spotify in late 2019, Pehar was head of revenue and agency partnerships at Twitter’s Canadian office, where he advocated for the integration of social media into marketing strategies, according to Roku’s…
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By Howard Law, author of Canada vs. California, and MediaPolicy.ca
The controversial federal Digital Services Tax is back in the news after Google raised prices charged to its Canadian advertisers by 2.5 per cent last week.
The August 1 price hike stoked demands from some Canadian commentators that Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland unilaterally withdraw Ottawa’s three per cent DST on a range of digital services offered in Canada by the largest Big Tech companies including Google, Meta, and Uber. One estimate puts the new tax revenue at $1 billion flowing annually into federal coffers.
Freeland’s DST came into effect…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Telus reported Friday a 3.4-per-cent decline over the year in mobile wireless average revenue per user (ARPU) in the second quarter, which executives said they are clearly not pleased about but said there are ways to improve outcomes.
For the three months that ended on June 30, the Vancouver-based telecom reported total mobile ARPU per month of $58.49 compared to the $60.56 in the same period last year.
“This was a result of continued intense promotional market activity and heightened competition,” Telus president and CEO Darren Entwistle said on the company’s second-quarter conference call Friday. “Notwithstanding the competitive pressure,…
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By Len St-Aubin, a policy consultant who has worked for clients including Netflix, and was a member of the policy teams that developed the 1991 Broadcasting Act and the 1993 Telecommunications Act
Online streaming has been the goose that laid the golden egg for original Canadian made-for-TV drama, comedy and documentaries, increasing production and budgets and winning global audiences.
Now the government and regulator are out to kill the goose. With the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) and the CRTC’s June 4 policy decision 2024-121, they are determined to apply to online streaming outdated and intrusive regulation that risks undermining CanCon’s…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Bell CEO Mirko Bibic said Thursday that 41 per cent of the company’s new internet subscribers in the second quarter also purchased a wireless plan, which is a testament, he said, to the attraction of the telecom’s fibre product.
Compared to last year’s second quarter, the company also saw an 18-per-cent increase in households bundling wireless and internet bundles where the company has fibre.
“We’re seeing very good bundling success, and that’s adding to the lifetime value of customers,” Bibic said. “Fibre continues to be the growth engine of Bell on the wireline side, and frankly, if you look…
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Rogers announced Wednesday it has become the presenting sponsor of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) as well as the TIFF People’s Choice Awards.
To kick off the 49th edition of the festival, TIFF and Rogers will host a VIP event celebrating TIFF’s origins in Toronto’s Yorkville district at the Four Seasons Hotel on Tuesday, Sept. 3. TIFF runs from Sept. 5 to 15.
“Rogers and TIFF share more than deep roots in our home city — we share a commitment to building a rich legacy in Canadian culture and entertainment, which we’re thrilled to celebrate as…
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Telus announced Monday a collaboration with the University of Ottawa Heart Institute and Badal — a cloud and data analytics services company acquired by Telus in 2023 — to deploy advancements to the Sayhut app, a secure, privacy-compliant point-of-care smartphone app that helps to reduce diagnostic time for patients who may be experiencing a heart attack due to a blocked artery.
The app improves the speed and accuracy of communication between first responders, emergency doctors and interventional cardiologists at regional cardiac centres by enabling instant transfer of patient data via the app, allowing medical personnel to securely…
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By Connie Thiessen
Music Canada, which represents the interests of Canada’s major record labels, says the CRTC’s move to impose mandatory contributions on the biggest music streamers, could amount to a “cultural policy disaster.”
In June, the commission announced that online streaming services not affiliated with a Canadian broadcaster that make $25 million or more in Canada, must contribute five per cent of their Canadian revenues to support the Canadian broadcasting system under the Online Streaming Act. Starting in the 2024-25 broadcast year, the funds will be directed to areas of immediate need, including local radio and television…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Videotron’s Freedom Mobile announced Thursday all monthly plans will now include access to its 5G network and roaming in the United States and Mexico – including new low-cost options starting at $5 per month after a digital discount is applied.
With the $5 monthly digital discount applied across all plans, Freedom subscribers can now start at a mere $5 per month to get access to the next-generation network and roaming in the U.S. and Mexico with 100 MB of data, two hours of talk and unlimited texting. At $20, they can get 3 GB of data with two…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Rogers is not done buying premium programming after its blockbuster purchase of the rights to content from Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal, the company’s chief financial officer said Wednesday, with a strategy of cutting out the middleman and going direct-to-studio seizing a chunk of its programming costs for quarters to come.
“We are looking to source leading programming that the customers watch, making that available and making that available at lower margins by cutting out the middleman company and going direct,” Rogers’s Glenn Brandt said during the company’s second-quarter earnings conference call.
“We will continue efforts and opportunities in…
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